A Tough Grind

A prime local example is the recently opened Vans Skate Park on the Westminster Promenade, a massive indoor/outdoor facility with 50,000 square feet of terrain (most skate parks offer less than 10,000 square feet). While the Vans park rivals the Denver Skatepark for size and terrain, and the two together should make the Denver area a premier destination for traveling pros, the Vans park charges $11 to $14 per two-hour session. Also, skaters under eighteen must bring their mom or dad with them to sign a liability waiver, and all skaters in the Vans park must wear a helmet and pads -- this despite a series of "Grand Opening" newspaper ads depicting a helmetless, padless skateboarder soaring off a ramp inside the Westminster setup.

On the flip side, most publicly funded skate parks do not require safety gear or liability waivers, because the prevailing legal wisdom is that doing so actually increases a city's liability exposure. "Fortunately, because a lot of other cities built skate parks before us, we were able to research what works in terms of liability," says Foster. "And what we heard, consistently, is that the best thing to do is simply treat the skate park like any other facility in our parks and recreation system." In other words, if the city doesn't require bicyclists to wear helmets when they ride on public paths, why should they make skateboarders wear helmets when they skate in the public park? "The skate park will have the same rules posted as any park," says Foster. "No alcohol, park closes at 11 p.m., and use at your own risk."

Cities that do require safety gear in public skate parks have had considerable trouble enforcing the rules. In April, the city managers of Sacramento, California, shut down the Cameron Park Skate Park just a few weeks after it opened, because users were utterly ignoring a posted requirement that they wear helmets and pads. The public park reopened in May, this time with a $5 fee in place to pay for "skate guards" in watchtowers, akin to lifeguards at a swimming pool. Attendance immediately dropped by 50 percent. Earlier this year, the leaders of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, approved a $50 fine for not wearing safety gear in the city's new skate park. There are still no skate guards watching over the park; the fine revenues are supposed to pay for an increased police presence in the park area. The system is failing, however, because the skaters simply post lookouts to warn of approaching prowl cars.

Denver City Councilman Ed Thomas believes the best answer for the City of Denver would have been to not build a skate park in the first place. An opponent of the park since it was first proposed, Thomas believes it is nothing more than a treacherous boondoggle. "Now that we have this skateboarding park, why don't we spend another million bucks on a knife-throwing park for the kids?" he says. "How about a drive-by-shooting range while we're at it?" Thomas brings up the death last month of a ten-year-old boy at a public skate park in the town of El Jebel that's operated by Eagle County. The boy, who had been riding a bicycle inside the skate park, died after he ran into a ten-foot-long, 150-pound steel rail, which was not properly anchored and fell on him, crushing his head. He was not wearing a helmet.

"You see, these places just aren't safe," says Thomas. "I can't believe we're not requiring helmets or even a liability waiver. The only thing that may save us a lawsuit here is that I don't think many skateboarders will actually use this park. Because this park is the one place where we, the establishment, are telling them they're allowed to do their skateboarding. And I think that in the skateboarding subculture, a big part of the thrill comes from doing something illegal. You take that away, I doubt they'll stay interested."

The raging popularity of skate parks across the country would seem to be evidence to the contrary. Thomas is right on one count, though: Skateboarding has long been associated with disaffected youth and rebellion. But as the sport has become ever more popular, it has also become more mainstream and has grown into a $3 billion-a-year industry fueled by X Games television exposure and a resulting surge in popularity among children and young teens. As the average age of skateboarders has declined, the emphasis upon the sport's ethos of the urban guerrilla has lessened. This is all to the dismay of skateboarding traditionalists in their mid- to late twenties and thirties, many of whom view the carefully monitored environments of modern skate parks -- not to mention their well-scrubbed young patrons -- as an intrusion on their lifestyle.

"Skate parks are no longer the place where all those punk-rock kids hang out," says Thrasher's Thatcher. "They've become the babysitting tool of the new decade. Parents drop their kids off at the skate park and go shopping."